The corruption in this country is like a great parasitic growth- one of the kind that you see on tropical trees that starts out as a small, vinelike mass feeding off one of the branches and then extends its roots downward, curling around the trunk of the tree and sucking it dry of nutrients until all that is left is the parasite, forming an empty shell in the shape of the original tree which has long since rotted to nothing.
Today on the news was a story about five top government officials who embezzled over 3 billion TZ shillings from the government using a scheme involving electricity. The recent power shortages experienced all over the country in the last month have apparently been because the officials were re-allocating the funds for electricity provided by the government to their own Swiss bank accounts, and cutting electricity off from the citizens under the guise of technical problems. On the news it was presented as a huge scandal, and rightly so. But the discussion it opened up at the dinner table tonight revealed such insanity that I find it both difficult and necessary to put it into words before it disappears from my mind.
This is not an uncommon occurrence. Not long ago, there was another incident where the government ordered and supposedly paid for several very expensive pieces of equipment from the UK, including a huge radar receiver that was supposed to be able to pick up all of the air traffic in Africa south of the equator. The shipments crossed the border; they arrived, and were unpacked. Only then was it revealed that most of the boxes were packed full of nothing but nails. The radar did arrive; it was unpacked, and set up. It never worked; it was a fake. The whole order had cost hundreds of millions of shillings.
Even in the small town where we are staying, there is a company that turns the taps to let water flow for a few minutes each day into their local customers’ water tanks; sometimes, the people in charge of doing this will stop the water flow to certain houses and extract a bribe before turning it back on. Those who do not want to pay the bribe must deal with frequent water shortages.
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Today J and I went to school to help with the entrance exams for Orkeeswa Secondary. The top primary school students (Standard 7) from all around the Monduli region came to take the test; this year, 228 students roughly between the ages of 12 and 25 registered for the exam, and all but one showed up. The test was composed of a spatial reasoning section, a basic math section (some sums/multiplication and a few very simple word problems), a “pick the one that doesn’t belong” section, a reading comprehension section in Kiswahili, and a short passage in English with 5 blanks to be filled in. I expected most of the students to do fairly well on all of the sections excluding English, since the questions looked like they should be easy for sixth and seventh graders. Instead, the average score of these handpicked top students was around 30/50. The quality of their education is very low and dropping every year, as teacher salaries and funding for schools continue to be cut.
There are a little over 300 seats in the Tanzanian Parliament. Around 40 of them are currently held by Chedema, and a little less than 100 of them are held by CCM members who have only Standard 7 primary school educations or less, and were elected to office by bribery and/or support from their wealthy and powerful parents.
So how do they get into office with so little education? In order to get the votes of the approximately 70% of the population who live in small towns or in semi-nomadic tribes in the bush, members of parliament have used their wealth to send people around to the rural houses and bomas with new clothing (kangas, which are only around 8,000 shillings apiece) and other small gifts for families in order to gain their votes. Traditional men living in bomas are often polygamistic and may have around 20 to 100 children each; also, if the man of the household makes an agreement to accept a gift and vote for a certain politician, it is culturally unacceptable for him to go back on the agreement, and he is obliged to order all of the members of his household to vote the same way. But since none of them know the importance of the government, and may not even realize that they are paying taxes and bribes for their goods, they are happy to accept the small items in exchange for their votes. It is like when Native Americans sold New York for pelts and beads all over again, but is happening now, every five years before an election.
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Starting Monday, there will supposedly be a nationwide strike of the Teachers’ Union to try and get a 100% increase in their wages. It may not happen at all, because government officials like school inspectors, as well as some teachers, will inevitably go to work out of fear for their jobs, their pensions, and their children. But apparently sometimes strikes have worked in the past to pressure the government to open up wage negotiations, so I wish them all godspeed.
Today J and I sat down on the edge of the soccer field in the middle of town to relax and read. Many small children, maybe around 8 or 9 years old (Standard 3 in primary school) who had been playing soccer in the field flocked up to us and began talking to us, asking us about what was in the books and eager to read with us. After a while, all of the books we had in our bags- two Kiswahili study books, and Form Four Physics, Chemistry, and Biology books- were out and distributed among the children, who were flipping through the pages excitedly; it was so incredibly adorable that I didn’t know what to do with myself. One of the Standard Threes, Baraka, was attempting to read the English words in the physics book and asking questions about the diagrams, so we explained them as best we could in our slightly broken Kiswahili at a level that an 8-year-old might understand. After about two hours, we trudged home up the mountainside, all the heavier for the knowledge that these children had probably never had such ready access to books before, and certainly didn’t have anyone to sit down with them and read. These are the people the government is stealing from; it is edging its people further and further into poverty; stealing its water and electricity, raising food prices, worsening the quality of education, making it difficult for impoverished parents to nurture their young children at home or even send them to school. J and I talked for a long time about the logistics of maybe opening up a day care program for very young children in town, to give them the boost in their early development that might make it easier for them to learn in school when they’re older. But this, like Orkeeswa, would only be another small patch on the huge, gaping tear that is the corrupt, backwards government in this country.
I often wonder whether I am working on the right thing here. Every time I turn on the lights, flush the toilet, or buy bread from the store, I feel a surge of bitterness that can only be a fraction of what the young, educated people in this country feel; these things should be easier to get, and people should be paying less for them. Their daily lives should be easier, so that development can actually happen. Someday, they say. But when is that?
Today on the news was a story about five top government officials who embezzled over 3 billion TZ shillings from the government using a scheme involving electricity. The recent power shortages experienced all over the country in the last month have apparently been because the officials were re-allocating the funds for electricity provided by the government to their own Swiss bank accounts, and cutting electricity off from the citizens under the guise of technical problems. On the news it was presented as a huge scandal, and rightly so. But the discussion it opened up at the dinner table tonight revealed such insanity that I find it both difficult and necessary to put it into words before it disappears from my mind.
This is not an uncommon occurrence. Not long ago, there was another incident where the government ordered and supposedly paid for several very expensive pieces of equipment from the UK, including a huge radar receiver that was supposed to be able to pick up all of the air traffic in Africa south of the equator. The shipments crossed the border; they arrived, and were unpacked. Only then was it revealed that most of the boxes were packed full of nothing but nails. The radar did arrive; it was unpacked, and set up. It never worked; it was a fake. The whole order had cost hundreds of millions of shillings.
Even in the small town where we are staying, there is a company that turns the taps to let water flow for a few minutes each day into their local customers’ water tanks; sometimes, the people in charge of doing this will stop the water flow to certain houses and extract a bribe before turning it back on. Those who do not want to pay the bribe must deal with frequent water shortages.
-----
Today J and I went to school to help with the entrance exams for Orkeeswa Secondary. The top primary school students (Standard 7) from all around the Monduli region came to take the test; this year, 228 students roughly between the ages of 12 and 25 registered for the exam, and all but one showed up. The test was composed of a spatial reasoning section, a basic math section (some sums/multiplication and a few very simple word problems), a “pick the one that doesn’t belong” section, a reading comprehension section in Kiswahili, and a short passage in English with 5 blanks to be filled in. I expected most of the students to do fairly well on all of the sections excluding English, since the questions looked like they should be easy for sixth and seventh graders. Instead, the average score of these handpicked top students was around 30/50. The quality of their education is very low and dropping every year, as teacher salaries and funding for schools continue to be cut.
There are a little over 300 seats in the Tanzanian Parliament. Around 40 of them are currently held by Chedema, and a little less than 100 of them are held by CCM members who have only Standard 7 primary school educations or less, and were elected to office by bribery and/or support from their wealthy and powerful parents.
So how do they get into office with so little education? In order to get the votes of the approximately 70% of the population who live in small towns or in semi-nomadic tribes in the bush, members of parliament have used their wealth to send people around to the rural houses and bomas with new clothing (kangas, which are only around 8,000 shillings apiece) and other small gifts for families in order to gain their votes. Traditional men living in bomas are often polygamistic and may have around 20 to 100 children each; also, if the man of the household makes an agreement to accept a gift and vote for a certain politician, it is culturally unacceptable for him to go back on the agreement, and he is obliged to order all of the members of his household to vote the same way. But since none of them know the importance of the government, and may not even realize that they are paying taxes and bribes for their goods, they are happy to accept the small items in exchange for their votes. It is like when Native Americans sold New York for pelts and beads all over again, but is happening now, every five years before an election.
-----
Starting Monday, there will supposedly be a nationwide strike of the Teachers’ Union to try and get a 100% increase in their wages. It may not happen at all, because government officials like school inspectors, as well as some teachers, will inevitably go to work out of fear for their jobs, their pensions, and their children. But apparently sometimes strikes have worked in the past to pressure the government to open up wage negotiations, so I wish them all godspeed.
Today J and I sat down on the edge of the soccer field in the middle of town to relax and read. Many small children, maybe around 8 or 9 years old (Standard 3 in primary school) who had been playing soccer in the field flocked up to us and began talking to us, asking us about what was in the books and eager to read with us. After a while, all of the books we had in our bags- two Kiswahili study books, and Form Four Physics, Chemistry, and Biology books- were out and distributed among the children, who were flipping through the pages excitedly; it was so incredibly adorable that I didn’t know what to do with myself. One of the Standard Threes, Baraka, was attempting to read the English words in the physics book and asking questions about the diagrams, so we explained them as best we could in our slightly broken Kiswahili at a level that an 8-year-old might understand. After about two hours, we trudged home up the mountainside, all the heavier for the knowledge that these children had probably never had such ready access to books before, and certainly didn’t have anyone to sit down with them and read. These are the people the government is stealing from; it is edging its people further and further into poverty; stealing its water and electricity, raising food prices, worsening the quality of education, making it difficult for impoverished parents to nurture their young children at home or even send them to school. J and I talked for a long time about the logistics of maybe opening up a day care program for very young children in town, to give them the boost in their early development that might make it easier for them to learn in school when they’re older. But this, like Orkeeswa, would only be another small patch on the huge, gaping tear that is the corrupt, backwards government in this country.
I often wonder whether I am working on the right thing here. Every time I turn on the lights, flush the toilet, or buy bread from the store, I feel a surge of bitterness that can only be a fraction of what the young, educated people in this country feel; these things should be easier to get, and people should be paying less for them. Their daily lives should be easier, so that development can actually happen. Someday, they say. But when is that?
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